Energy is the only currency

Back in the 80s? 90s? There was a movie with the underlying precept: time is money. Or money is time, in that case. In that movie, everyone was born with the same amount of time. They died when they ran out. Time was currency. In that story, the focus is on a boy who is very enterprising. Young in life, with his savings habit and ambitious work pursuits, he is already well ahead of most people time-wise. He often sees this rich beautiful woman in a big car that he will get newspapers for, for the extra bits of time.

Time marches on and eventually he is a young man, and his mother is running out of time. He has 300 years extra but there is no way to ‘transfer’ this time. He journeys to the city far away, to those who would have to give permission, and he asks to gift his own 300 extra years to his mother. They point out that nobody has asked to ‘give’ time in eons, in part because people are just not generous like that. The main decision maker is very moved by the young man. He is ‘wise and good’.

At the same time, the rich beautiful woman from his childhood — who still looks just the same — sees him, and tells him that she has arranged an investment opportunity for him that will cost him exactly 300 years, not by coincidence. It will give him the chance to truly move out of the poor world and into the world where you always have enough time. The decision maker tells the young man he will give permission to transfer the time to his mom. The beautiful woman tells him that his mother would want him to have this opportunity, instead.

At the end of the movie, he is back in his neighborhood, and the rich woman gives a string of pearls to his two cousins, who promptly fight over them (a white-trash moment) and they end up breaking and as the guys are scrabbling in the dirt for them, the young man and the beautiful woman are driving away in her big car, and she says sadly, “We all start with the same amount.” The movie was essentially a statement on how, no matter what the currency is, you are going to get rich and poor people, and it isn’t really what you’re born with that matters.

It was not a great movie, but it caused me to think about it quite often over the next few years, the concepts involved with it, which I suppose made it worthwhile no matter the cinematic detail.

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The other night we went to see that movie ‘In Time’. The actors are the current hot young thangs hired for looks or current commodity, not worth mentioning much except the cop, who is Cillian Murphy, also seen in Inception and the Dark Knight, and may very well be the only person in the movie who can truly act (aside from his coworker with a bit part, and Matt Bomer also with a bit part). Fortunately, the movie is not demanding, so it’s somewhat ok… consider it entertainment, not dramatic entertainment.

In this movie, again, time is money is time. The people in charge are not wise and good, they are careless of it, from disconnected to actually evil. “For a few to be immortal, many must die,” is the understanding of the rich. Time is like every stock and commodity on the market and treated exactly as so. People are locked into “time-zones” they cannot afford to get out of. The prices are controlled completely in the timezones, so overnight inflation can go up radically. Everyone has precisely 25 years to live and then 1 year of time that kicks in on their birthday. Then they die. Assuming they can make their time last even a year in the economy. Every single day is a struggle to get enough time to get all the way through it, never mind have enough until the next morning. The merciless economic hardships and fluctuations of ‘the market’ which is really just a matter of a lot of very rich people managing a world they are immortal in, is a constant struggle.

I won’t detail the happenings as that would give the movie away. Suffice to say there are parallels between the two movies but a very different, more dystopian element in this one.

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I stood on the sidewalk along the dark parking lot alone, after the movie, as it was midnight, I was waiting for the cab and the girls were in the theatre (mine and the next door neighbor’s teen I took with us). Something triggered me at the very end of the show, maybe the somewhat haunting credits tune, and I felt very intense and quiet.

I started thinking about money, and then about time. And it sort of hit me like an epiphany that is tough to put into words (or, you can, but it just sounds stupidly so-what when you do), that everything in our world, in our reality, in our body, in our universe, comes down to only one currency in the end: energy.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how true it was, until I got to the body, and realized (somewhat startled) that this is what human death is: it’s running out of energy. Literally.

It isn’t about age, except that age causes us to increase our ‘energy loss’ exponentially, almost like a car that becomes less and less efficient over time. That varies based on genetics, the person, etc. It isn’t about disease, except that disease itself reflects a sub-standard amount of energy, an energy crisis that is system-wide but especially specific to one location; it is like a brown-spot on the leaf of a plant, or a withering of a branch, and the tree may survive if it can shed that leaf or branch, but may not if the core problem is in the roots instead. It isn’t about injury, except that if injury abruptly stops the ability of the body to continue cycling energy, it is promptly dead. Everything that sustains our liver cells is the same stuff that sustains the rest of us.

Which is also the thing that sustains the reality we perceive. Objects lose energy too, from the more obvious molecules at the surface that oxidate to rust, to the integrity of materials affected by weather and time, to the very maintenance of reality itself, by and through us and all the other energies we interact with. My slant-desk across the room from me is vibrating energy. If physicists knew how yet, a pop-gun could make that desk pop out of reality in an instant. (The same for a person, except that I believe some life forms more than others have a much broader spectrum of energy involved so it’d be more work.)

I think I mentioned once, that I’d heard the idea that everything in our world is based on the Sun. That money could be thought of as little pieces of paper representing the Sun. Because it drives the possibility of everything that is. I realized that not only was this true, but more profoundly true than I had understood before, because the sun is energy, is the source.

Much like I realized with Prince of Disks tarot — that he lives through me–the sun is the ultimate example of this.

It lives through us, through space, through planets, through rocks and rivers and trees and animals and microbes and humans and the gases in the atmosphere. It is akin to ‘The Holy Spirit’ as our old books would call it. Maybe it is an Aeon of the Holy Spirit or something we might call that I guess, something bigger than we can even conceptualize.

The degree to which we are alive is the degree to which we are in resonance with and able to ‘contain’ that energy.

P